Getting Started with GitHub

You may have heard about GitHub but didn’t know where to get started or why you even should. When I first started to learn to code, I felt the same way. GitHub is a fantastic resource for developers and is definitely something worth learning.

What is GitHub?

GitHub is a social network built to share and collaborating around code. It hosts many open source projects that developers can easily contribute to. GitHub also allows for developers to collaborate on private projects.

GitHub is where great software is built. With more than
10 million people, GitHub is a community where developers can easily discover, reuse, and contribute to more than
24 million projects using an industry standard workflow.

GitHub is run with Git software. Git is a version control software that helps track each version of the project you are working on. It keeps track of the changes you’ve made and makes it easy to see how your project has changed over time.

Why do I need Git and GitHub?

One of the most important reasons to use Git is to be able to track versions of the project you are making without having a ton of different versions of each file. It allows you to go back and see changes in your project to find bugs. Using Git is also extremely helpful for teams that work on projects together. You can work on the same project at the same time and be able to merge changes easily.

Using GitHub in addition to Git adds the ability to collaborate from anywhere. GitHub is also useful for developers to show the projects they are working on with others. Many use it as a portfolio of their work.

How do I get started?

There are many great resources to learn Git and GitHub. I have included below some of the best resources I’ve found.